Browsing & Searching the Scientist Marketplace

Have you taken a test drive of the Scientist marketplace yet? Signing up is easy, and you can even look around without signing up, so by all means go for it. If you’re the type that likes to kick the tires, though, here is a short tour of how we’ve set things up to help you find what you’re looking for. Also, you might even learn something new about the assays utilized in drug discovery and development.

To begin with, we’ve categorized our services by the functional units typically found in drug discovery organizations, namely biology, chemistry, dmpk, pharmacology, and toxicology. Each discipline is in turn broken out into subdisciplines, which list assay categories. Clicking on the category will list all of the assays for the category.

Why is this expert categorization important? Searching is great, but browsing is important, too. Seeing the assays in context, and also related assays, helps you to choose and plan. While browsing, even if you aren’t logged in, you’ll be able to see the details of each service, including sample type, turnaround time, and the results you’ll receive. By clicking on the ‘Add to Cart’ button, you’ll be able to download a spreadsheet which gives you much more information about the samples and information you will need to provide. You can also ask questions directly to the service provider by clicking on the ‘Request Info’ button.

Prices are listed, to help you budget, unless pricing requires more information. In this case, click on the ‘Request a Quote’ button, and you can even request a quote from more than one service provider. We also provide related services at the bottom of each service listing, and these results are curated by our drug discovery experts. In addition, you may want to look at other categories or subcategories to plan your experiments accordingly. This feature is one of the benefits of the organization of the marketplace.

We’ve also put a lot of thought into the search feature. Using the search input at the top right, you can enter the name of a service or key word, and the results will appear in the main window. Every service provider with a service that matches the search term is listed on the left, and you can click on any of them to see all services provided. In the main part of the window, the services are listed. Those that require a quote will have a ‘dialog’ icon in the top left, others will have a ‘test tube’ icon. You may also notice that the color coding for each service is based on the discipline it’s in, so you’ll always be able to orient yourself.

We think that our detailed characterization of the Scientist marketplace services will help you not only find the service you need quickly, but may also help you to learn about other assays that you may not be as familiar with. We think that besides the benefit of being able to search and compare services, that a more comprehensive understanding of assays used in drug discovery will help researchers to accomplish more.